Edito

It is a great pleasure to be able to welcome again the photographers and the audience of the Boutographies in the setting of the Pavillon Populaire. Renovated and embellished, this emblematic place of author photography in France and Europe offers privileged conditions for exhibition and visit, which contribute greatly to the aura of cultural events that take place in our city. Here, photography can continue to work in its own way, with its particular abilities to reach all audiences, to show us the world elsewhere and otherwise. Sensitive receptors of who we are and what we try to be together, beyond divisions and confrontations, the exhibited images illustrate perpetual questioning and very contemporary situations.

At Cristóbal Ascencio, we will see how a painful family history becomes the crucible of a living and creative memory. With Hannes Jung and Alessandro Silverj, these are deadly sociopolitical behaviors that are denounced through the stories of those who have suffered, in silence and for many years, intolerance and instincts of brutal domination. Alexandre Bagdassarian looks at young people who are often reduced to simplistic representations: incarcerated minors. Anouchka Renaud-Eck is interested in the constraints that weigh on young couples in a country, India, where they are confronted with ancestral traditions as well as with the technological means of modernity. On the side of Marie Lukasiewicz and Pascal Sgro, it is about our contradictory relations with the desires for well-being, even opulence, and environmental concerns. Several of these photographic proposals incorporate digital manipulations and sometimes images generated by Artificial Intelligence. It is always specified beforehand, and it is in a process of questioning our modes of representation, whatever the intentions that inhabit the images.

This year, the Jury’s screening will benefit from a large space set up for this purpose in the central room of the Pavillon Populaire. You will be able to see about ten remarkable series, selected among the six hundred application files that we received from all European backgrounds.

Beyond the official selection, other exhibitions are presented in the Pavillon Populaire. Upstairs, on the left side, you will find the works carried out by Alexandra Frankewitz as part of the APF residence, and those of the invited European school KABK, (The Hague, Netherlands). On the ground floor, on the right, you can discover the achievements of high school students and students, to whom we give a special place in this first year of the bicentenary of the invention of photography, which will be celebrated throughout France in 2026 and 2027. A Parallel section, an Outside the walls and many opportunities to meet photographers complete the abundant offer of this 26th edition of the Boutographies.

«The Festival of Boutographies, organized by the association Grain d'Image, presents its 26th edition from 9 to 31 May next. Created in 2001 by a group of photography enthusiasts, this festival offers each year in the month of May, for three weeks, a focus on new European photography. Over these 26 years, no less than 603 photographers from 34 different countries have shared with each of us their vision of the world. This year, the festival will bring together, around Pauline Caplet, curator, gallery director and president of the 2026 jury, the work of 24 photographers in hanging and projection at the Pavillon Populaire and in various places of the city.

After restoration work in 2025, the Pavillon Populaire, a reference place for historical and heritage photography, is once again made available to the Boutographies team by the City of Montpellier. The artists selected for this edition come in turn to question family histories, true crucibles of each person’s memory, to challenge ancestral practices or society’s views on political systems, youth or the environment. Mobilizing, dynamic, resolutely turned towards contemporary questions, the festival of Boutographies invites all visitors to live beautiful human and visual discoveries.

Agnès ROBIN

Deputy Mayor of Montpellier,
Delegate for Culture and Scientific Culture.